Abstract
Many have heard the phrase or something like it: "When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression." With a provocative title and expansive scope, Boersema’s Can We Unlearn Racism? is an important and timely cultural sociology of changes that have reshuffled dominant White South Africans’ lives after the formal end of apartheid. The “We” in Boersema’s title refers both to White South Africans and white Americans – two racially privileged groups with surprisingly similar settler colonial histories. The lessons here could be applied to many liberal democracies struggling with racism and white supremacy. Inspired by Melissa Steyn’s Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa (2001), Can We Unlearn Racism? engages with and builds on scholarship on white racial projects through his analysis of white identity politics. Boersema compellingly shows how White South Africans retain social dominance and white privilege through a discourse of liberalism and equity. I read the book to prepare my interview with the author for The Annex, a sociology podcast. Our conversation recaps the major arguments in the book and offers some fascinating details about Boersema’s process in carrying out the project.
Written with a U.S. audience in mind, Boersema reviews South Africa’s history of colonization and dispossession, including the mythology of the independent White farmer and the reinforcement of Afrikaner (White, of Dutch origin, Afrikans-speaking) nationalism. This is helpful to Americans like me whose education has a number of deficiencies with regard to the rest of the world and the continent of Africa in particular. White South Africans constituted a small minority of the population but dominated the nation using the brutal apartheid system that thoroughly repressed the Black South African majority and limited opportunity for Coloured (mixed-race) people and others. White dominance of South African political, economic, and social life was essentially absolute while simultaneously relying on exploited Black South African labor. This system lifted practically all White South Africans out of poverty while consigning millions to extreme economic deprivation and physical separation. While Black South Africans constituted over 75% of the population for much of this period, they were forced into separate city neighborhoods and 3.5 million were removed to "Bantustans" on just 13% of South Africa’s land area. This totalizing system was in place from 1948 until 1990 when Nelson Mandela was freed and South Africa began an uneven and uncertain revolution that aimed to end white supremacy.
Boersema takes readers on a bracing tour of South Africa’s racial politics. He combines detailed and empirically rich qualitative techniques including ethnography, interviews, and analysis of political discourse, with chapters on electoral politics, the workplace, home, and school to show how elite and working-class White South Africans, and their political leaders, understand and participate in the process of unlearning white racial privilege. The breadth of this text is a core strength, but also a potential liability. Each institution Boersema covers: school, home, work, and politics, and others he does not, e.g. religion, the economy, and sports, could be analyzed through a white identity politics framework. There is room for other authors to dive even deeper into each of these areas of social life. That’s a good thing. This book argues that White South Africans have not unlearned white racial privilege, but rather transformed the overt racism of apartheid into a new form he calls white identity politics. Boersema writes, "White identity politics is the process of adopting the language of marginalized communities originally intended to promote multiculturalism and minority rights, and then reimagining identity politics and group rights for the benefit of White people" (p. 3). White identity politics promotes White self-interest and downplays or rejects ample evidence documenting racial inequality, institutional racism, and White privilege.
Each chapter keeps tight focus on White identity politics and the many ways White South Africans reconstruct racial boundaries. Since these chapters cover major social institutions, they could be used individually, or in combination for undergraduate and graduate courses that address the institutionalization of anti-Black racism. In this review, I will highlight two. In Boersema’s superb chapter comparing an upper-class gated community with a more racially mixed middle-class neighborhood, he finds that many upper-class White residents, who work in nearly all-white spaces, believe that their community already represents the multicultural future of South Africa. They are also concerned with property crime within their community, continually tightening security protocols and surveillance, practices that criminalize the largely Black service-class employees that keep their lawns manicured and houses clean. At the same time, White residents say their neighborhood mirrors the safety and order of the apartheid era. Clearly, racist attitudes and the structural supports of white supremacy have not been transcended. Middle-class Whites mostly support racial integration at work but not in the home, where they defend the right to exclude Black South Africans, arguing that the majority-Black city is disorderly and unsafe. White residents suggest that they work well with Blacks but need to protect their peaceful, orderly home life by socializing exclusively with other Whites not because of racism, but due to cultural differences.
Boersema also compares the perspectives of young White men and women at two schools, one elite and nearly all-White, the other more racially mixed, with White, Black, and Coloured students. In this chapter, Boersema highlights tensions in maintaining white supremacy among Whites, where high-status White women at the elite high school say that they value the new multiracial South Africa while justifying their seat through an ideology of meritocracy that simultaneously positions Black groundskeepers as dangerous potential rapists. The middle-class young men studied often express disenchantment with the new South Africa, presenting themselves as harmed by the end of apartheid, many seeking employment outside the continent, where they believe whiteness is still highly valued. For many of these young men, competing on a more level playing field with Black South Africans is not a sign of equality but rather oppression. White privilege dies hard and does not “naturally” decline among younger Whites with no personal memory of apartheid.
Boersema’s book holds important lessons for anyone committed to developing and sustaining multiracial, multiethnic democracy in the United States and elsewhere. Right-wing organizations and political parties, White Christian Nationalists, and many more share white identity politics, co-opting justice movement language in ways that serve to reframe, justify, and consolidate White supremacy. This is an illiberal use of liberalism, and should be recognized and critiqued for what it is: an assault on the fundamental values of a pluralistic, multiracial and multiethnic society that is inconsistent with a well-functioning democratic society. This book is a must-read for students and scholars of anti-Black racism, whiteness, and politics in South Africa, the United States, and the rest of the world, too.